30 July 2012

In the spirit of the Olympic games IN SPACE

The 2012 Olympic games in London is underway. All around the world people are enjoying the numerous sports and athletes competing in it. We sure love sports! Sports have been part of all the civilisation on Earth. Every country in our days have there own "national sport" and the phenomena continues.

So what about sports in Space? What about the sport legacy in space faring civilisations? As we venture into Space, we will surely take our favorite sports with us and play them the old fashion or adapt it to zero gravity environment.

Here is a clip of Astronauts playing baseball and football (soccer) on the International Space Station.

Once hotel companies start to build and operate orbital accommodation,
they're going to be endlessly improving it, and competing to build more
and more exotic facilities. One of the areas in which they'll compete
will be in building zero-G sports centers. Basically, the bigger these
are the more interesting the opportunities they'll provide.

Once hotel companies start to build and
operate orbital accommodation,
they're going to be endlessly improving it, and competing to build more and
more exotic facilities. One of the areas in which they'll compete will be in
building zero-G sports centers. Basically, the bigger these are the more
interesting the opportunities they'll provide.

Zero gravity stadiums

In the first stages they'll
be maybe 20 meters across, which will be big enough for zero-G gymnastics,
ballet, and a range of sports - if not football! For example zero-G versions of
existing terrestrial sports, such as table-tennis, badminton, tennis, and even
basketball. As the structures get
larger, a wider range of games will become possible, with room for spectators
too. Then, once hotels include substantial rotating sections, ball-games will
have the new feature that the ball will follow a kind of spiraling path, which
will literally add a new dimension to throwing and catching! See "Design
and Construction of Zero-Gravity Gymnasium".

Entirely new sports

Once you're thinking about
stadium-based sports like football, other new kinds of possibilities open up,
like momentum transfer between team-members and opponents, giving "launch
assistance" to each other, and others. Another area is water
sports. A zero-gravity "water-room" with some large "blobs"
of water which you can throw at each other, or through which you can dive, will
provide a lot of unique entertainment. But there will be a new safety problem
to solve. Probably everyone will be required to wear a mouthpiece for an
emergency air supply, because in zero-G you won't float to the "top"
of a blob of water, of course. So if everyone has a few minutes' air-supply,
that may avoid some panic attacks! And once there are rotating
hotels, true rotating swimming pools will get built, in which you can swim
around the interior surface, and then dive out to float in the zero gravity in
the center! Water's heavy, though - 1 ton/cubic meter - so quite a modest pool
will contain 1000 tons of water - which will be a serious investment, even at
only $100,000 / ton launch costs! So those facilities will be part of large orbital
complexes. See also Activities in
Space.

The big event

As we said above, things
will start small, and grow bigger. So holding Olympic games in an orbiting
zero-gravity stadium 100 meters in diameter, for example, is obviously not a
realistic project in the near future. But instead of dismissing it as a
ridiculous fantasy - as many "space industry" people would - consider
that:

Its
feasibility depends on straightforward business economics, and
specifically on the cost of launch, and the market value of media rights.

It's an
interesting question how soon after the beginning of space tourism it will
happen - it will depend mainly on the growth rate of space tourism
services.

And while it would be easy
to say "Orbital Olympics are at least 50 years away" we should also
remember that when a new service gets really popular, business growth rates can
be spectacular. For example, recently Internet-connectable personal computers
and mobile-telephones have shown fantastic growth rates, with both sales and
investment growing by tens of $billions per year in just a single country! Why
shouldn't there be a global "space tourism boom" on a similar scale?
In that case it could lead to spectacular growth rates. And before space
tourism reaches a scale of even 1 million passengers per year, large-scale
sports facilities will certainly be built in orbit - because they'll be good
business investments for hotel companies.Source: http://www.spacefuture.com/tourism/sport.shtml

My name is Stefan Lamoureux, I am the president of the Astronomy Club Toutatis, Kustavi, Finland. We organize all kinds of activities concerning astronomy and night observation at our Observatory in Kustavi, Finland. Also we travel around the world to visit the astronomy scene and write about it. Welcome to our blog and enjoy the astronomy behind it!